It’s one thing to have a great salesperson who closes sales quickly and consistently meets targets. Sales leaders aim to increase the ability of teams. One way to do this is through personal mentoring, observation, and helping team members improve. But that is not scalable beyond a point. Figuring out if the quality of sales calls has improved over time is also a hard task.
If the sales team is working remotely, finding out how effective calls to customers have been is even harder. That’s where Inbound Calling from HubSpot helps to make a difference (presently available in the US, UK and Canada and is being rolled out to other countries in phases).
Depending on how sales reps reach out to customers via calls or Zoom, it is possible to integrate them into HubSpot. Since conversations are captured and transcribed in the CRM, sales teams can review the calls later and identify the nuances—where they went right and what changes need to be made.
Conversation Intelligence provides the insights and concerns voiced by customers. It is a powerful addition to the sales arsenal.
Automatically gets data into the CRM: Get all the relevant data into the CRM without having to think about it. Rather than requiring reps to enter properties after every call, customers can turn on call recording, and all the relevant data will be linked to the records.
Coach on real data: Once all of these calls are in the CRM, teams can look directly at what happened instead of having to rely on notes or memory. This enables a whole new world of coaching behaviours. Reps can review their top hits with their managers. Teams can create weekly meetings to review specific sales/service tactics and how effective they are.
Analytics & Insights: Once all this data is accessible in the CRM, it can be used to gain insight into the whole business process. These insights can come at every level of the organization.
It also becomes possible to aggregate this across an organization to get a high-level view of what prospects and reps are discussing.
It’s one thing to know what the problem is. But solutions have to be devised as well. That’s where playbooks come in.
You can create playbooks to address several aspects of a sales interaction and provide references for reps to act on. They won't be at a loss for words or answers. It may include a callout line or links to helpful pieces of content.
Playbooks help sales teams to keep relevant information readily available to make important points during customer calls.
They can be broad or specific, depending on the situation and what the sales rep needs to access. Imagine that a customer asks about the competitive benefits your product offers. It may not be possible for the rep to remember all the ways in which your product scores. But creating a playbook that lists and counters what the competition has to offer reassures customers. And ensures nothing is missed out.
Playbooks are flexible and can incorporate queries that a customer has asked over a call that could apply to others as well. More importantly, they preserve firsthand concerns and issues a customer brings up and help prepare the ground for a wider set of options to answer specific customer needs.
By keeping this within the HubSpot environment, access is easily available and in a context that makes sense to sales reps. Conversation Intelligence is a good input for working on and creating playbooks built on actual customer feedback and interactions. It is quite possible that some aspects of a customer journey will be common across the board, and it helps to have a handle on what is top of mind for customers.
Sales Managers looking to get their teams to perform at a higher level now can diagnose what’s happening by reviewing customer sales calls. They can pick out the portions where an objection was well-handled, where a cost issue was raised, and how it was countered so that reps can use the best of their own teams’ experience and build on their own as well.
This has implications for how the sales teams rely on each other and bring their collective experience to bear. Right now, each of them functions in an individual capacity. By bringing in strategies that can benefit the whole team, it results in raised standards and goals that others can aspire to.
There could be reluctance initially. Transparency in sales calls could sharply distinguish the articulation and knowledge of some team members. It is up to the Sales Head to navigate these calls and help those looking for support catch up.
When they understand that this can transform their own skills, the resistance will be reduced. It would also help to involve the whole team in creating playbooks and walk them through situations they have faced. By combining several experiences, the ability to figure out customer intent collectively also rises—which means the whole team is on board.
Talk to us at Blueoshan on how you can benefit from implementing this across Sales Teams and what integrations are possible right now. Our consultants will be glad to help.